Larry Stratton @LarryStratton15

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN: We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water. We have rubbish police so we hire private security. We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead. Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top. An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers. NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself. Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral. You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway. Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county. Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it. Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone. CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments. Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost. Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks. Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope. Half of them are technically insolvent. Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers. The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing. Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk. 999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for. Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing. Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself. Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created. The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes. Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want. The library is staffed by pensioners working for free. Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero. You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age. You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care. Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it. Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979. Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip. The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory. You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went. The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.

POSTMAN SERVED 42 YEARS. THE POST OFFICE SERVED HIM A PRISON SENTENCE Noel Thomas spent 42 years working for the @PostOffice. He started as a postman on Anglesey in 1965, then ran the Gaerwen branch with his wife Eira for over a decade. He had also served as a Plaid Cymru county councillor since 1986, the kind of man villages build community halls around. In 2006 the Post Office accused him of stealing £48,000. The evidence came from Horizon, a computer system with a talent for inventing crimes nobody committed. On legal advice he pleaded guilty to false accounting to avoid a theft charge and stop his legal bill climbing further. He was jailed for 9 months. The Post Office's opening move was sending him to HMP Liverpool Walton, locked in his cell 23 hours a day. After a week he was moved to HMP Kirkham, where he worked in the prison greenhouses. He was released after 12 weeks for good behaviour, fitted with an electronic tag as a parting gift. While he sat in prison the Post Office made sure he lost his council seat too. A man who had served the community since 1986 was disqualified from Anglesey Council over a shortfall a faulty computer system invented. His pension, earned over 42 years, was gone. The family sold their home to their own son just to keep it out of the Post Office's reach, then moved in with daughter Sian. In 2021 the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction, one of 39 overturned that day after the Post Office admitted it would not contest most of the appeals. Sir Alan Bates, the Craig-y-Don postmaster who built the entire legal fight against the Post Office, had been organising support for people like Thomas since 2009. After @ITV dramatised the scandal in Mr Bates vs The Post Office in January 2024, politicians who had said nothing for years suddenly found strong feelings about Noel Thomas. Ynys Môn MP Virginia Crosbie posted online about securing him a meeting with Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake @kevinhollinrake. Thomas's daughter Sian told her on X to stop, said she had never met her, and called the sudden interest opportunism. Llinos Medi @llinos_medi, then the Plaid Cymru candidate for the seat and now its sitting MP, made the same accusation in public. Anglesey Council later held a formal vote of gratitude for Thomas, with Cllr Bob Parry telling colleagues he would never forget the image of him being led into a police van. Last year Bangor University @BangorUni gave him an honorary degree for exposing the truth. Weeks later the Gorsedd of the Bards inducted him at the National Eisteddfod. Wales gave him robes and a doctorate. The Post Office gave him a prison number. He is 77 now. 42 years handing out stamps and listening to a village's problems. 9 months in a cell for a crime a computer invented. 15 years spent clearing his name. A doctorate. A seat among the bards. The one thing nobody can give him back is the years he spent proving he never stole a penny. SOURCES: @BBCWalesNews @nickwallis @northwaleslive @ITVWales and many others.

@ArturNadol7566 @PostOffice Why was it that the Horizon computer system seemed to corrupt the data to the advantage of the Post Office and never the Postmaster?

Brilliant 🤣🤣🤣

@JohnWathenBerry @oldyeavering If you'd paid more attention during the denim lesson in your home economics class when you and David Dundas were at school, John, that could you have been your song.

POST OFFICE BANKRUPTED A MAN FOR ASKING FOR HELP 91 TIMES Lee Castleton spent 9 years in the RAF, then worked as a stockbroker in the City. In 2003 he and his wife decided they wanted a slower life for their two young kids. They sold their home and bought a small Post Office branch in Bridlington, on the seafront. Within a year the dream job turned into a nightmare. His accounts started showing losses that made no sense. So he did the responsible thing and called the Horizon helpline. Then he called it again. And again. 91 times in 12 weeks, begging someone to explain where the money was going. Nobody could tell him. The Post Office's answer to being told 91 times that their own system was broken was to audit him, suspend him, and demand he pay back 25,000 pounds he never touched. Castleton had no money left for a lawyer so he represented himself in the High Court, alone, against an organisation with a government sized legal budget. He lost. The Post Office then chased him for 321,000 pounds in legal costs and bankrupted him. That is the reward for reporting a fault 91 times. Bankruptcy. The fallout went well beyond the shop. His kids were bullied at school. His daughter was spat at because people in town assumed her dad was a thief. His wife's health suffered under the strain. All because a computer system got the maths wrong and nobody at the top wanted to admit it. In 2019 Castleton was one of over 550 former postmasters who won a group settlement of 58 million pounds. He personally received 20,000 pounds, a rounding error next to what the case cost him. He was even locked out of a mediation scheme the Post Office ran for people who believed they had been wrongly pursued. Years later former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells told the Horizon IT Inquiry under oath that Castleton's treatment was unforgivable. She also said she had likely signed off on the 300,000 pound bill that ruined him. Unforgivable is one word for it. There are others. Castleton is now suing the @PostOffice and @fujitsu_uk for up to 8 million pounds, arguing the original 2007 judgment against him was obtained by fraud. In May 2026 the Court of Appeal ruled his case should be heard as one trial instead of being split into pieces designed to bury it in cost and delay. A small win. Nearly two decades late. He wanted a quieter life running a post office by the sea. Instead he became one of the clearest examples of what happens when an institution would rather bankrupt an innocent man than admit its software was broken. Sources @BBCNews @lawsocgazette @ComputerWeekly and others

@BrandyandLovage @JohnWathenBerry @Goodwood_Races Takes 'keeping it in the family' to a whole new level, doesn't it?

Our last harvest from these fields.@AngelaRayner accepted this scheme would cause “irreversible detriment” to our farming business and a significant impact on our family. Permission was granted nonetheless. Our last harvest. The consequence of a policy decision. 😢

Just like his Grandad

Our horsebox was stolen today from our yard in Exeter Road, Newmarket between 12 noon and 3.30pm. If anyone has any information as to its whereabouts we would be very grateful to hear from you. All shares very much appreciated.

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@Alwaysknowsbest @T_J_Carroll I think you'll find it was not a silver spoon but a biscuit!

@glennmid10001 @AtTheRaces Pretty flimsy case. Why should the bloody racetracks get compensated? - no-one else does.

"Honestly, I don't know where to fucking start"

@010983dw @LydiaHislop Don't be obtuse, Dave. You know exactly what Lydia means - rated by the international handicappers. And rated by John Gosden when it suits, too, clearly.

Trying to explain to someone that the fav in the Derby was declared a non- runner despite only missing the start by a couple of lengths but Wrist Art in the 5:03 at Yarmouth is a runner despite having his leg over a stall and never coming out of them. The rules need looking at.

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep. The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements. For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own. The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing. Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin. So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good. A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off. You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

Here it is: my 2026 manifesto for the #Makerfield By-Election. Makerfield Great Again! #VoteBinface #MakeYourVoteCount

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it. Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at. Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets. That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting. This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid. So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram. The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck. And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

"I once spent £400,000 of other people's money on jewellery, cosmetics and a campervan and my wife didn't know anything about it."

What are people mostly worried about in the UK today? You said "VAT rates on Theme Park Admission" "If it's up there you can bum me on camera"